Reading the Mind of Norman Rockwell’s Undecided Voter

Rockwell's “Which One? (Undecided Voter; Man in Voting Booth)” appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1944—the last year, before the present one, in which a Presidential election was contested by two New Yorkers.

The art of Norman Rockwell keeps getting better, as the funny or sweet covers that he created for The Saturday Evening Post become history paintings. Nuances of meaning that his contemporaries would have got at a glance are often elusive now, though recoverable and sometimes freshly relevant in relation to his constant theme: little crises of American experience.

Consider “Which One? (Undecided Voter; Man in Voting Booth),” from 1944—the last year, before the present one, in which a Presidential election was contested by two New Yorkers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey. (The painting will go on display at Sotheby’s on Friday, and is expected to fetch between two and four million dollars at an auction on November 21st.)

Remember undecided voters? Most of us on either side this year, our minds made up to abyssal extremes, marvel at the putative existence of the species, as at unicorns. (Hence, perhaps, the momentary fascination with Ken Bone, the red-sweatered star of the second debate.) Beyond that, what’s really exotic in Rockwell’s scene is its portrayal of a man who is thinking. Who thinks now? But let’s time-travel.

The undecided voter is a smartly dressed middle-aged gent, inviting demographic speculation. When younger, he must have been something of a dandy. When still younger, he may have come from nothing much—rising in the world, as Americans, or at least white Americans, frequently did back then. He likely works in upper-middle management somewhere—no higher, one suspects, given a self-conscious raffishness that’s a bit incongruous at his age. He holds out against conformism.

So: a cinch for F.D.R. in past elections. But now, in 1944, the man wonders whether Republicanism might be better styled for his enhanced station in life. (You know he belongs to the country club.)

It comes down to two men. Dewey: unenchanting, but not a bad egg. There’s bound to be a Republican President again someday. This one? This day? On the other hand, F.D.R. (Would you believe that American politics could once be ambidextrous, with neither hand inevitably clenched?) Four terms as President are an awful lot, even for Mr. Four Freedoms, which Rockwell had made the subject of his iconic paintings the year before. But there’s still a war on. Horses in midstream and all that. And twelve years of apparently fortunate events in the voter’s life have transpired with Roosevelt in the newspapers and magazines and on the radio.

Being conscientiously informed on “the issues,” as evidenced by the Cedar Rapids Gazette that the man holds and by the brochures that protrude from his coat pocket, doesn’t settle anything. Does it ever? Aren’t our votes always episodes of autobiography, not about what we know but about how, and as what, we opt to see ourselves?

Rockwell was a lifelong liberal who, toward the end of his career, eschewed his wonted whimsy to agitate powerfully for the civil-rights movement. But he was often taken on the left, and certainly by enthusiasts for modern art, as reactionary—fantasizing an America that never was, went one refrain. It’s true that Rockwell’s nation is imagined, but it’s based on precisely observed facts squared with deeply serious hopes.

To be American is to be more or less made up out of cultural spare parts, organized by habitual emotions. Rockwell knew that better than anybody. He specialized in showing how those parts shift—slightly, and harmlessly enough—under worldly pressures. His form, as in “Undecided Voter,” is comedy, because things plainly will be all right. No disaster probable, the man thinks, whichever way he votes.

Is America even conceivable without such optimism? Are we going to find out?

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.”